Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania Annual Meeting
New Orleans, Louisiana
January 30 to February 4, 2018
Deadline for Submissions: 1 November 2017
As the effects of climate change increasingly shift the conditions of everyday life within the Pacific region, food security has come to the fore as a pressing concern. Changes in ocean temperature have shifted fish populations, rising water tables have changed soil salinity, and an increasingly globalized food system has created economies of import dependence. The organizers of this informal session invite participants working on issues of food security, sovereignty, and indigenous food knowledge, in order to explore how growing, provisioning, and eating are negotiated within Pacific Island communities. We invite these conversations to be wide-ranging, and to engage questions of gendered labor, new technology, epistemology, abundance and scarcity, and changes over time. We are also interested in the historical conditions that make and unmake ways of eating and engaging with the environment, including colonialism, modernity, migration, and trans-Pacific networks. Contributions are welcomed from a range of theoretical perspectives that critically interrogate how food economies, cultures, politics and cultural representations shape lives and livelihoods in the contemporary Pacific.
Themes could include, but are not limited to, critical consideration of:
• Frameworks of food security, food self-sufficiency and food sovereignty within Pacific contexts;
• Analysis of contemporary and historical food politics, including different food and farming movements and campaigns, particular land and resource struggles and other considerations of the political economy of food;
• Changing practices of food provisioning in relation to reproductive work, intra-household inequalities, time burdens and time poverty;
• Informal food exchange and trading networks and the continued importance of subsistence livelihood practices for Pacific food security;
• Changing food security practices and food cultures in relation to diaspora, migration, displacement and environmental degradation of woodsheds;
• Reflections on the changing meanings, uses and uptake of Pacific staple foods, including the promotion of particular crops for food security and nutrition (e.g. breadfruit);
• Relationships between cash crop economies, food exports and household food production/security;
• Critical perspectives on nutrition discourses and food, health, development interventions and biopolitics in Pacific contexts;
• Food aesthetics, practices and economies of desire in relation to militarization and tourism in the Pacific;
• the status of ocean resources, fisheries and marine management in Pacific Oceania;
• Representations of food in indigenous Pacific knowledge production and cultural representations, as well as in Western production of knowledge about the Pacific.
Participants interested in this session are invited to contact the co-organizers with a suggested topic of interest, intention to participate, or any questions that you might have.
Hiʻilei Julia Hobart: hiilei.hobart@northwestern.edu
Amanda Friend Shaw: a.f.shaw@lse.ac.uk
